Canva Acquires Leonardo.AI in Push for In-House AI Abilities
Canva is solidifying its push into the Gen AI sphere with the significant acquisition of Australian AI content production platform Leonardo.AI.
This acquisition, completed in record time, makes it Canva's eighth, and second of 2024, following the earlier procurement of Affinity.
“We're thrilled to welcome Leonardo.AI to Canva - two Australian companies joining forces to bring world-first breakthroughs in AI and creativity," Cameron Adams, Canva's Co-founder and Chief Product Officer said following the news.
The introduction of Leonardo.AI to Canva is designed to accelerate Canva's research and development efforts in Gen AI, bringing the foundational model to Canva's global community of 190 million monthly active users.
Canva’s Gen AI augmentation
Founded in late 2022, startup Leonardo.AI has rapidly established itself as a formidable player in the AI content creation space.
Much like other Gen AI models, users of Leonardo.AI can generate images in any chosen aesthetic in seconds with simple prompts, create videos and sketch with AI.
Yet its new foundational model Phoenix offers unprecedented prompt adherence, coherent, accurate text in images and the ability to generate production-ready assets in one shot.
Creators can even custom-train models with their own datasets, adding an additional level of personalisation.
With over 19 million registered users and more than one billion images produced in just 18 months, Leonardo.AI's technology has found applications across various industries, from marketing and advertising to entertainment and architecture.
This capability adds to Canva’s previous Gen AI offering Magic Studio. Since its launch in 2023, Magic Studio has been used more than 7 billion times, demonstrating the growing demand for AI-powered design solutions in the workplace.
Although the company leverages OpenAI's models like DALL-E for its Magic Studio image creation suite of tools, the company has built much of its Gen AI technology internally.
Acquiring Leonardo.AI signals further augment its in-house capabilities and streamline the creative process.
"Today marks the start of a new chapter which will accelerate the pace we innovate at Leonardo.AI. Joining the Canva family means we can invest more deeply in scaling our AI research efforts globally, and move even faster to deliver new features and functionality to creatives worldwide," JJ Fiasson, Founder and CEO of Leonardo.AI says.
Canva’s pursuit of an AI future
Canva is currently undergoing a period of remarkable growth. Last year, the company reported that its annualised revenue had reached US$1.6bn, with six million team accounts from notable organisations such as American Airlines, Marriott, Salesforce and Zoom.
Leonardo.AI’s foundational model intends to build on the offerings Canva can give those customers to turn their ideas into designs in an instant, all without leaving the platform.
Already, users of Canva have seen what previous AI acquisitions have brought the company, with its 2021 buy of AI platform Kaleido.ai enabling them to remove image backgrounds at the click of a button.
This move by a leader in corporate design underscores the growing importance of AI in shaping the future of creative tools and services, and this consolidated approach stands to set a new industry standard for those wanting to utilise AI in their creative process.
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